Alan Machin: Tourism As Education - Topics

This new extension to the web site will make it easier for visitors to read postings from the main web pages on www.alanmachinwork.net.

On these pages they will be arranged thematically, the first being the growing group of postings about the origins of tourism as education. All postings are planned to appear first on the main web pages and the main ones will be duplicated here within their themes.

Graduation 2007 photos are on the main web site pages - follow the link at the foot of this page.

All research begins with some kind of question. Someone wants to find out what, why, when, how or who? – in connection with a topic. Some examples were given in the previous posting. They weren’t the kind that would form the basis of a dissertation, but they could be close. Start with your interests because you need to do a research project that you are interested in – you have to work on it continuously for several months! And here’s another tip – think of two or three because the first you think of may not work and there are important practical considerations to keep in mind – more about them later.

If you asked me for my interests I might say the geography of tourism, tourism planning or visitor interpretation. Those are the key subjects that I teach. How would I turn the geography of tourism into a research topic, though? One interesting and important question that everyone working in tourism management needs to know is: what are the changing world patterns in tourism? That leads to thinking about what the new destinations are, such as China and India, as well as the new tourism-generating countries that will supply tomorrow’s visitors, such as China (again) and the countries of eastern Europe. But this is a huge subject and could take you much more than 22 weeks to do – and in any case, you can get a pretty good idea just by looking at a specialist travel atlas.

So here are two key things to consider – can you carry out the research in the time you have got and have you chosen a topic that can be answered just by reading the right book? If the answers to those questions are respectively no and yes then you won’t get a successful dissertation completed......

READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE on the page "Doing A Dissertation" in the list to the left.

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